With its Gemini chatbot and Pixel AI phone software, it's fair to say Google has an obsessive focus on artificial intelligence. But all that advanced computational power requires millions of computers, known as'servers', housed inside data centres across the world that operate 24/7. Now, in an attempt to cater to its vast AI needs, Google is going nuclear. The tech giant has signed a deal with California-based nuclear firm Kairos Power to build new nuclear reactors to supply its US data centres with energy. Although the location of these reactors is yet to be revealed, Google said the first will be operational in 2030, with more to follow by 2035.

Almost exactly a year ago, Google launched its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) v4 chips at Google I/O 2021, promising twice the performance compared to the TPU v3. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google's datacenters would "soon have dozens of TPU v4 Pods, many of which will be operating at or near 90 percent carbon-free energy." Now, at Google I/O 2022, Pichai revealed the blue-ribbon fruit of those labors: a TPU v4-powered datacenter in Mayes County, Oklahoma, that Google says is the world's largest publicly available machine learning hub. "This machine learning hub has eight Cloud TPU v4 Pods, custom-built on the same networking infrastructure that powers Google's largest neural models," Pichai said. Google's TPU v4 Pods consist of 4,096 TPU v4 chips, each of which delivers 275 teraflops of ML-targeted bfloat16 ("brain floating point") performance.

Google I/O 2022, Google's largest developer conference, kicked off with a keynote speech from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The keynote speech had major announcements including the launch of Pixel watch, updates on PaLM and LaMDA, advancements in AR and immersive technology etc. Let us look at the key highlights. "Recently we announced plans to invest USD 9.5 billion in data centers and offices across the US. One of our state-of-the-art data centers is in Mayes County, Oklahoma. I'm excited to announce that, there, we are launching the world's largest, publicly-available machine learning hub for our Google Cloud customers," Sundar Pichai said.

Global warming is on the rise due to the presence of the highest levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide levels compared to the past. Data Scientists, data engineers, and cloud experts all have come forward to create a more sustainable environment by following the best practices in Machine Learning. Machine Learning models create a detrimental effect on the environment when using substantial computational resources and energy while getting trained for thousands of hours on specialized hardware accelerators in data centers. The average temperature rise has been increasing steadily over the last 3 decades (from 1980), as illustrated in the figure below. All popular Meteorological agencies/bodies show similar trends, which have made environmentalists, geologists, and technology experts in different domains come forward and set certain standards for controlling the temperature rise.

As of today, Google has eliminated its entire "carbon legacy." By that, the company means it has purchased high-quality carbon offsets to match all of the emissions ever produced by its data centers and campuses. That includes the emissions generated before Google became carbon neutral in 2007. The company says it's the first in the world to eliminate its carbon legacy. Carbon offsets are credits for renewable energy that are meant to compensate for emissions made elsewhere.